Desperately Seeking Turtle

by

Hey Folks! Welcome to a new week… or at least I am going to try and take a positive stance even though I feel like I did not get enough sleep at all this weekend. Partially it was that I stayed up way the heck too late reading a book most nights, but even when I did stop… I still struggled to fall asleep. This has ended up creating a situation where I am fairly out of it this morning. That said it was still a very enjoyable weekend as a whole and I spent most of my time screwing around in Guild Wars 2. I also played some multiplayer gaming of a game that is under a very strict NDA, which I can’t talk about but wish that I could. Most of my gaming for the weekend was of the directionless variety, I would let a single activity direct me somewhere and then latch onto whatever happened to fall across my path.

The first of these was doing the Chalk Gerent with a big group. I don’t remember specifically how I ended up latching onto this commander, but it was during another event that I just happened across and decided to join the tag. When there is a commander in the zone, you can click on their “tag” in the map and choose “join squad”. Often times a single commander may be doing a handful of metas and when one finishes they will post the waypoint for the next one they are doing in sequence. This was the case and what ultimately led me to Tangled Depths and to do the Rata Sum lane for the first time. This is without a doubt the best lane because you get to watch a giant robot fight something resembling a Kaiju. Through their tutelage, I actually stayed around after the event and learned that a new area opened up for us to loot, and doing so gained me a new mastery point.

Similarly, I happened to be in the Seitung Province to knock out the End of Dragons daily quest and happened upon another Commander that was organizing the zone meta. Which led me to kill the boss of it for the first time and with it gained another mastery point. These are really my happiest moments in the game where I allow the chance to direct my gaming for a while. Now when I group up like this I might stay for a dozen metas or only a couple, and the free for all nature of grouping in the game makes it so that when I eventually do fade away it isn’t a big deal. I love the casual open grouping of Guild Wars 2, and it allows me to feel like I participated in something epic… without the stress of finding a group and interacting with other human beings directly. Now that is not to say that I won’t chat while we are doing things… but it is also very easy to disappear when I have become “peopled out”.

The bane of my existence right now however is Dragon’s End. This is the big meta zone at the conclusion of the End of Dragons content. This is likely the most difficult meta event in the entire game, and legitimately takes two hours’ worth of prep work before you can successfully get to the final encounter. As a result, this one is much harder to get into a group for, and when a commander starts something in group finder… it is almost instantly full with no ability to get on the same map as the rest of the team. This proves the weakness of the world event system, in that you can’t limit who is on your map to only people participating in the event. As a result, there are always going to be stragglers that are just there to smell the roses and complete some objectives… and this is really the first event where that is a critical problem.

Ultimately I want to complete the event so I can get my Siege Turtle egg… and unlock that mount which is now starting to be required for some content. In Gyala Delve, for example, you have to use Siege Turtles to break down walls and unfortunately, unlike Dragons End, there are no NPC-controlled ones that you can mount to break things down. There are ultimately two ways to get the egg, either complete the meta all the way to its final conclusion or collect 200 Writs of Dragons End and purchase one from a vendor. So while I continue to fail at getting a viable group going in Dragon’s End, I am at a minimum spending time there each day completing events that will at some point add up to 200 writs. I currently have 70 after a single day of actually purposefully trying to farm them… so in theory, by this time next week, I should at least be well on my way to a Siege Turtle mount.

Other than that I spent some more time working on Living World Season 1 on the Ranger. Since I had finished no content at all on the Ranger until recently… I decided to use this character to play through ALL of the seasonal content in the appropriate order. I was stalled out for a bit on the Tower of Nightmares which is a completely miserable place. In order to get the credit you have to do the first two floors in a public group, and this really means you need to be doing this during prime time in order to fill a team. After a half dozen false starts where I was one of only a handful of people in the zone, I stumbled into a team of around a dozen people doing the same quest… and I hung onto them for dear life. While I could have bailed early when I got quest completion, I held out and followed them all the way up the tower and got an achievement for completing it.

I also completed the story mode version of the Marionette fight, which was really freaking cool. I want to do this legitimately at some point and will need to hang out in Eye of the North looking for a group at some point. From there I am leading up to the attack on Lion’s Arch and might knock that out tonight. I’ve enjoyed Living World Season 1 quite a bit, but I think I am ready to move on with the story and revisit Living World Season 2. I remember when I first ran it, I was confused as hell as to who all of these characters I was now interacting with were. I am ready to approach it with fresh eyes after already coming to love all of the members of what will eventually be Dragon’s Watch. It was really weird to see how much of a little shit Taimi was at the start. She rapidly became one of my favorite NPC characters, but she was such a butt in these early quests. Jory and Kas used to annoy me… or more so how airheaded early Kas is, but revisiting them with the love I already have for the characters has blunted that edge a bit. Braham is still… well… Ka-Braham… and doesn’t become a fully fleshed-out character for a very long time.

I think for me at least part of what makes Guild Wars 2 so special, is that it took so damned long for me to realize what a magical game this was. I hated it for so many years because I did not understand it. I kept trying to get into it and being frustrated that for whatever reason it was not grabbing me in the same way that it seemed to grab others. Ultimately it was a frame of mind that shifted and allowed me to understand it better. So long as I kept trying to lump it in with the other WoW-Like MMORPGs, it never really worked for me. When I realized that it was way more like the Diablo-Like ARPGs that I love so much, I finally was able to grasp how it functions as a game. I wish I had been able to grasp that a decade ago… but I guess I am thankful that I finally do nonetheless.

AggroChat #425 – Check Your Filter

by
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we start off with some light discussion about Guild Wars 2 and more specifically the new patch that dropped on the 28th including a brand new map called Gyala Delve.  We talk briefly about wrapping up Diablo 3 Season 28 and looking forward to the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch landing next Thursday.  We talk a bit about Microsoft getting to subpoena Sony for records about their practice of paying companies to keep games from GamePass.  We also talk about the practice of corporate write-downs and how Wizards of the Coast and Funko have gotten caught throwing massive amounts of product in landfills recently.  From there we have a sort of rapid-fire discussion of a bunch of mech names, namely Mechwarrior Online, the upcoming Armored Core game, and Mass Builder.

Topics Discussed:

  • Guild Wars 2
    • Gyala Delve Content Drop
  • Diablo 3 Season 28 Finished
  • Last Epoch Multiplayer Patch on 3/9
  • Phantom Brigade
  • Beating Wagon World
  • Microsoft gets to Supoena Sony
  • Wizards and Funko Land Fill Disposals
  • Mechwarrior Online
  • Armored Core
  • Mass Builder

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Fifteen Books

by

Good Morning Friends! It has been a bit since I gave an update on my reading journey, so I figured I might as well close out the week with one. At this point, I’ve read fifteen books and am currently working on my sixteenth. As sad as this sounds, this is more books than I have ever read in any given year at any point in my life. Traditionally I am at max a five-books-a-year sort of person save for that one year where I read ten Dresden Files novels back to back. I love books and I even love bookstores more, but I’ve never really carved out a place for reading in my life. My wife on the other hand reads every moment she has available so it isn’t like books are an uncommon objective in our household. However in the past, if I had time to fill, I would do it with games, movies, television, anime, or comics well before I would sit down and read a block of prose.

Now Audiobooks have helped a lot in this venture because I can play something while listening intently to the radio play happening in my ears. However, I’m now working away on my fifth actual book of the year so something seems to have clicked in my brain. I’ve said before that I always considered myself a slow reader in the past, but I’ve also noticed that this seems to no longer be the case. I’ve only been working on my current book for two nights and only then in an hour or two before I fall asleep and I’m already a dozen chapters in. Granted I have largely pushed aside everything but gaming from my normal diet of media and dove full-on into this experiment. At some point, I will probably pause these proceedings and catch up on things like my growing queue of Netflix and Disney Plus shows. For now, I am going full steam ahead and seeing how far I can get.

When last I talked about my reading journey, I mentioned that it was pretty likely that I would be starting Hounded the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles pretty soon. I had this recommended to me by my good friend Lyle as a somewhat Dresden Adjacent series of stories. When I read through the Heroic Hearts compilation of short stories, there was a short story called Fire Hazard centered around the perspective of Atticus’ Irish Wolfhound companion Oberon. This gave me the impression that this series was going to maybe be a bit too “Captain Planet” for my tastes, but thankfully after having finished the first novel this was very much not the case. I am guessing the perspective of a dog sort of cartoonized the tale and sanded down the rough and jangly bits to smooth it down into a largely technicolor experience.

All told I greatly enjoyed this first novel. I like this setting and its take on the Druid and in large part the Fae. The character of Atticus O’Sullivan was largely enjoyable as well. It rode the line between having a being with immense power and trivializing every encounter. There were actual dangers and they get bonus points for looping in Witches, Werewolves, and Vampires without making it a setting ABOUT Witches, Werewolves, or Vampires. I get the Dresden Files reference because it does feel really compatible with that body of work. If you had told me that these two individuals inhabited the same space I would have probably believed you… other than some slightly incompatible bits centered around specific spins on how magic works in each world. Then again that could even be chalked up to just the perspective of each family of casters. I’m absolutely going to dive further into this series at some point.

In fact, I almost did dive into the second Iron Druid book and probably would have were it not for the fact that my Library Hold on the second book in the Gentleman Bastards series came open. Red Seas Under Red Skies is the second outing of Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen and it picks up pretty much immediately following the events of the first book with a very broken Locke convalescing very poorly. I am not entirely certain who told me this, but I had it expressed to me that the first book in this series was excellent and that they largely went downhill after that. I heartily disagree because if anything I like this second book considerably better than I did the first. Sure you have the same pattern of “Locke Plans a Big Heist and Things Go Horribly Wrong Until they Don’t” but the details are unique and nonetheless still enjoyable to experience.

I’ve never aspired to be a thief or a criminal mastermind, but I absolutely get why this sort of character is so fond by the fanciers of skullduggery. I think more than anything I enjoyed the introduction of some interesting crews of pirates, and honestly, I am hoping some of those characters show back up in the third story. Republic of Thieves is the next book in the sequence and it was released in 2013, and Thorn of Emberlain has been announced for years… with constantly sliding release dates with the speculative date of January 2021 long past. I am trying to set my expectations of this being a series that might be something I very rarely get to visit given the seemingly slow release schedule.

Truth be told, Locke Lamora’s books are so dense that I could not handle reading more than one of them in a row. They involve having to keep a bunch of characters and details in your head while consuming them, in order to try and keep the plot that often jumps around between time periods straight. This led me to my current book The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. This was recommended to me by my friend Ace, but even before then I knew of its existence and the title alone would get me interested. I love “monster movies” in part because I grew up with a UHF channel that would play marathons of them during the summer months. Mothra is the queen and we should all bow down before her. I am not sure what it is but I think the love of Kaiju is a specifically Gen X trait, as most of my friends of similar age brackets also have a thing for them.

So far I’m about a dozen chapters into this novel and I am enjoying it greatly. I would classify this as a very light read, not getting bogged down in too much cryptic detail. Granted I am only a short way into the book as a whole so that might change, but if it does it will have earned it by giving me a long on-ramp of relatively chill prose. As is often the case I don’t want to talk too much about the details because my goal with my book talk posts is to not really dive too far into the story beats or risk spoiling anything. Suffice it to say however this is a book where Kaiju are very real and a group of scientists of assorted disciplines is studying them. Rather than seeing Kaiju in the trappings of a disaster movie, this is more of a clinical and scholarly setting, which I am enjoying greatly. Think of the corporation in Cabin in the Woods that maintains all of the Lovecraftian horrors, but instead this friendly group studies Kaiju. If that premise at all interests you then I suggest you give this one a look.

I don’t usually plan too far ahead, but at this point, unless something really shifts around and changes I am likely to dive into book two of the Iron Druid chronicles once I finish with my Kaiju friends. The only thing that would really change this is if one of my longer Library Holds come open, but so far that looks unlikely. They both estimate that it will be months before I see any of my holds. I’m not sure if anyone out there really cares about my reading journey, but considering it is part of my world at the moment it ends up presented in blog form. I am enjoying myself so I guess that is all that really matters.

What Lies Beneath

by

Good Morning Friends! This is a pretty exciting week on top of wrapping up Diablo III Season 28, we had the first content drop from Guild Wars 2 after the “roadmap” and “vision” for the game going forward were announced on the 13th. This new content patch came out on the 28th, but much to my chagrin I realized that I had a library book that was going to be due on the 1st… so instead of really playing any of the new content I pushed my way through the second book in the Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch. That meant last night I was entirely focused on getting into the game on my Necromancer and trying out some of the new content.

For the last few weeks, there has been a certain amount of consternation from the community stalwarts about what exactly Guild Wars 2 looks like in a “post-living-world” environment. The pattern of things in the past has been that there would be a paid expansion followed by a sizeable gap while the content was being worked on with a living world season released and then another gap until either another living world season or the release of another paid expansion. The “roadmap” instead seemed to indicate that we would begin to see smaller expansions followed by quarterly content drops leading up to another paid expansion in a semi-yearly cycle. I think in the grand scheme of things this sort of release cadence is best for growing a population of active players, but I also think the quality and detail of each single map drop needs to be significant. Not all expansion maps in Guild Wars 2 are created equal so would this be a Bloodstone Fen that folks rarely revisit or something more akin to a Drizzlewood Coast and becomes an active pillar of the community?

Last night I finished the story as it exists currently, finishing with the “Deep Trouble” mission. Something of note, I have never played Guild Wars 2 current content ever. I’ve never been caught up enough with the game to play “Living World” content as it was being doled out, so I have no real frame of reference for what to expect. What is currently in the game seems to be four story missions that lead you down into the Gyala Delve, and introduce you to the situation that is happening there. My gut feeling is that I am waiting on some sort of timer before the next set of quests drops, but in reality, I might be waiting a few months given that the next content drop is expected “before summer” whatever that means for a timeframe. I enjoyed hanging around with Gorrick, Rama, and Yao and want more of the “Best Friends Detective Agency”.

So while the story left me somewhat wanting… the zone is absolutely phenomenal. If this is the sort of expansion map that we can expect to be seeing every three months or so, I think the community is going to be extremely pleased. Effectively the map unfolds over the course of four subregions, the first of which is above ground… and then the next three regions going deeper under the jade sea into a mining pit of a sort. The further down you get the more sinister things to end up being. There is a void haze mechanic that requires you to keep renewing a Jadebot Filtration system at each outpost. Being down in the complex of caverns and tunnels eventually will use up your filter requiring you to get a new one or risk taking damage over time from the haze. Visually everything is stunning, with probably my favorite bit being that you can see aquatic life frozen in the jade walls, for example, this big whale shadowed in the distance.

What I spent most of my night doing was doing bits and pieces of the meta event that spans the zone. Essentially this reminds me of a weird mix of Drizzlewood Coast and the Chalk Gerent meta. You are following Gorrick, Rama, and Yao as they retake sections of the cave complex and in doing so make them safe from the incursion of the haze and corrupted Jade Brotherhood members. Essentially you follow the red events and they will take you through the sequence as you leave the “safe” camp up top and head to various points on the map retaking them. During each sequence, there are a number of side bosses that spawn and a big battle to take back a base. Along the way, each encounter will spawn a number of Gyala Delve Mining Caches that you can open with Jade Miner’s Keycards.

The final phase of the event involves fighting three bosses on three different platforms, so you ultimately have to split your group in order to deal with all of them. I am uncertain how this is supposed to work, but in my experience so far everyone keeps killing their boss until everyone else has killed theirs as well. I assume there is supposed to be some measure of coordination, but it feels like right now we are largely brute-forcing this mechanic until we find out something better. Over time the community will learn the best way to do this, and I have a feeling this entire sequence is going to be popular for farming the Gyala loot boxes. I managed to pull one of the unique items from the loot boxes, a Mini Void Emberknight. Completing the final event also seems to reward you with two Luxon Hunter’s Weapon Caches which include brand new jade item appearances and drop with the Ritualist’s prefix.

All told I had a lot of fun doing the meta a few times, but realistically I need to get my Ranger caught up because I think I would rather do these metas on that character as opposed to my Necromancer. The Necro is a content soloing god, but it feels like I do a much better job at being a team player on my Soulbeast Longbow Ranger. So more than likely I am going to fall back to working on catching that character up through the story. I might pop my head into Gyala once a night and try and ride the meta for a single completion or something, but I would rather be there with a different character long term. In truth, I want to get the Ranger up because it seems like a better option for ALL team content in the long run. I mean I could always respec to a more group-friendly Necromancer build… but then I would not be as good at soloing content as I am now.

Now that I have finished with the story as it stands currently, I am going to venture forth today and check out some of the community opinions about how successful “What Lies Beneath” and Gyala Delve have been received. Until I completed the story I was staying entirely away from any content about the game because I wanted to experience it all with fresh eyes. I personally think this is a good course forward with the game and I look forward to more of these content drops if this is the quality of content we are going to get. The new meta is really fun and feels extremely rewarding. The only thing that would be better is if there was an albeit rare chance of getting ascended drops. I mean that might be the case but the wiki pages for Ravenous Wanderer are not filled out yet, so I am not sure we know the full drop table yet.

Have you dipped your toes into the new story content drop? What were your feelings about it? Drop me a line below.

[Edit] – I found out after writing this that you do in fact have a chance of getting some ascended stat choice weapons from this meta. More specifically the new Sword, and both new Dagger appearances.